Chinese mistranslations into English have long proved a source of amusement to anglophones, as we have already seen with the “Chinglish” phenomenon But, we wondered, how do mistranslations that go the other way, from English into Mandarin — sometimes referred to as Engrish — come out sounding to the Chinese?

Equally amusing, according to the Chinese-born blogger Tian Tang. Tang’s site, Hanzi Smatter, is dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture. While the majority of the mistranslations on his site (Hanzis are Chinese characters) come from Chinese tattoos gone horribly wrong, other postings point out sports mistranslations.

Great comments. I took Chinese in college for 2 years and can relate to how hard it is to obtain good translations from Eng to Chinese. BTW, I need the characters for “go for the gold”–a native Chinese told me in pinyin it is zheng xu jin kai but not sure about the characters. Can anyone post them? or correct the translation and give me the characters?